7/7
Napoleon

What shall we do today? This is the question asked in many a well- fed household in the deep midwinter of Christmas and New Year when boredom and cold turkey have set in. Let me suggest voyages of exploration to seven wonders of art too often overlooked, and offer pegs on which to hang your own perceptions.

RAPHAEL - THE TAPESTRY CARTOONSRaphael's careful preparations on stout paper (cartone in Italian) for tapestries of the same size were commissioned by Pope Leo X and completed between June 1515 and the end of the following year. Seven of the original 10 were bought by Charles I, and like Mantegna's Triumphs were reserved for Oliver Cromwell, their moral value in illustrating the Acts of the Apostles more important than their financial worth. Though still in the Royal Collection, they are on permanent deposit in the V&A, hung too high, the light too dim, the sheets of glass too busy with ref lections: they should be in the National Gallery. In the two centuries they spent in Hampton Court, they provided English painters with the vocabulary of expression, gesture and realism of the High Renaissance, with its nobility of scale and narrative, its physical ideals and their grotesque counterparts, and its occasional absurdities. Here is a compendium of beautiful women, handsome men and ugly runts engaged in high emotion and great effort, in rage and compassion, serenity and awe, violent death and miraculous cure, their influence as images so formidable that time and again the history of art is littered with references to all these figures and the dramatic compositions into which Raphael wove them. In their presence we are as near as can be to the sublime Raphael of the School of Athens; they are together the greatest work of the Italian High Renaissance outside Italy.

CHARLES SARGENT JAGGER - THE ROYAL ARTILLERY MEMORIALAfter the Great War the Royal Artillery wanted a memorial that was unmistakably theirs, and they got it. The great stone block, part architecture, part ziggurat, part mausoleum, part carved relief, supports a nine-inch Howitzer and is embellished with the names of long- forgotten campaigns in Mesopotamia and Macedonia, as well as those of the Western Front. On the long sides stand a driver and a shell carrier. The driver is enveloped in his cape and leans back, arms spread wide, his right hand gripping a horse-whip, his left resting on the stone ledge, the little finger set apart. Jagger had an eye for hands and their unconscious expression, and for other details too - one calf is bound in puttee bandages, the other encased in buckled leather to protect it from the riderless horse of the pair hauling the gun. The sense of great thrusting volume as his cape falls over pouches and packs is repeated in the figure of the captain on the short flank, below the barrel of the howitzer; the sudden absence of volume, the sense of forms deflated and collapsed, the shoulders of a greatcoat over chest and pack, its skirts draped like a pall over the edge of the podium, tell us that on the north flank the soldier there is dead.

Entirely without Christian symbolism or mawkish note, this is more than a monument - it is a great work of art, the last great war memorial, at least as great a sculpture as Picasso's Guernica is a great painting.

Hyde Park Corner, W1

REMBRANDT - SELF-PORTRAITThe painter confronts the spectator, his gaze direct, the mouth set in silence. We are discomfited, sensing a challenge, not knowing how to respond, for far from the conventional invitation to discourse issued by most speaking likenesses, this is discouragement; in a moment, Rembrandt will turn his back and continue working on his circles, an enigma beyond our comprehension. We turn to easier things and observe the tone, warm against cool, and the colour, restricted to a single patch of rich red in a field of subtleties, and the light that streams onto the painter from a high window to the left. This falls heavily on his white cap, his brow, and the sheen of sweat on his stout nose, filters through the wiry grey hair, and tucks under the jowl to fade on his white shirt. These two patches of white paint frame and emphasise the face and give it dominance over the retiring bulk of the body that supports it. We are absorbed in contemplation of the brushes, palette and mahlstick held in the left hand - bold straight lines of paint and drawing that should make the upstart Auerbach slink away in shame. We are mystified by the two arcs; are they, as some claim, references to exquisite lines drawn by Apelles, painter to Alexander the Great, and his peer Protogenes, with Rembrandt about to draw a third and claim to be their equal? Or to Vasari's tale of Giotto drawing the perfect circle? Or to Rembrandt's new sense of security between Hendrijke and Titus? We shall never know, and must content ourselves with the certainty of brushstrokes.

ANDREA MANTEGNA - THE TRIUMPHS OF CAESAROf the two greatest works of art in Britain (the Raphaels are the other), Mantegna's series of nine canvases illustrating the Triumphs of Julius Caesar after his victories in Gaul and Pontus is the earlier. These date from either side of 1490 and were painted for the Duke of Mantua in three groups of three, with perhaps quite long gaps between, some with compositions linked, some not. From the very beginning they were acknowledged as great masterpieces; young Rubens was overwhelmed by them, when Charles I bought them in 1629 they were widely regarded as his greatest treasures, and when the Commonwealth dispersed that collection they were retained as in some sense reflecting Cromwell's victories in the Civil War.

Mantegna was remarkable in seeming to subvert the triumphal mood, instead engaging our sympathies with dejected prisoners and exhausted soldiers as much as the victorious looters and their trophies. Can we interpret this as suggesting a political stance?

Look too at Caesar's evident lack of exultation and rejoicing, his daunting expression one of melancholy and grim intent. These are Mantegna's truths informing the literary sources on which he drew, Suetonius, Livy and Appian, as well as examples drawn from the antiquities of Rome. None of the nine is in good condition, but the restoration carried out in 1962-74 by Joan Seddon (who died earlier this year) was itself a triumph, the original paint recovered from under earlier restorations to reveal the ghosts of Mantegna's magnificent intentions.

ANTONIO CANALETTO - A VIEW OF VENICEThis view of Venice, painted in 1736, is almost panoramic in its sweep from San Giorgio Maggiore on the left, across the broad Giudecca Canal to Santa Maria della Salute marking the narrower entrance to the Grand Canal, the eye then swinging round past the Doge's Palace and along the Riva degli Schiavoni towards the point, well to the right, where you, the spectator, stand to survey these exotic marvels. You, then, are invited to descend the quayside steps, board the small boat in the centre foreground and move off to the left and into the opening between other craft that leads deep into the pictorial space, back to San Giorgio - completing the perfect round trip of the harbour. The left half of the picture is devoted to the city's bustling marine life, the right to more domestic matters where long shadows cast by the figures tell us that it is late in the afternoon; in the far distance the light is more softly and subtly shadowed, imposing unity on the horizon and compelling us to explore it close, slowly and in detail if we are to comprehend the great spatial depths within this most beautiful and accomplished souvenir of the Grand Tour. It has some reasonable claim to be the loveliest Canaletto in England.

ANTONIO CANOVA - NAPOLEONWhen Napoleon, in 1803, commissioned Canova to carve this marble statue, he was 33, First Consul for life, well into the long height of his powers and not displeased by his physique. Canova, who had just spent some time with him and found him charming, was determined to make of the great man a statue that in scale and symbolism would rival any carved in ancient Rome and, typologically, it conforms to the antique ideal of the heroic nude. Nudity had moral implications: stripped of all trappings, Napoleon nude, ideally formed, his physical perfection an indication of his spiritual state, was removed from his time and made a creature of eternity. Canova was thought to have surpassed himself in this sublime and noble masterpiece, and indeed he had, for of a short man he made a giant three metres tall, athletic, finely muscled, not static - as the ancient Roman sculptures were - but confidently striding, a slight contrapposto running through the body, turning the head, tilting the shoulders, implying that the lance is less a weapon than a walking stick, the sword and belt abandoned on the tree stump that by means of a strut of marble offers the figure essential support (a similar strut supports the fragile outstretched right forearm). When set up in the Louvre in 1811, Napoleon, by then a stout and round-shouldered Emperor, forbade its exhibition. In 1816 the British Government-bought it for less than £3,000 and presented it to Wellington. There has long been speculation as to what is under the fig leaf: I have no answer and observe only that in other sculptures Canova proved himself a master of the well-filled scrotum.

CHARLES BENNETT LAWES-WITTEWRONGE - THE DEATH OF DIRCEThe most invisible sculptures in London are those that flank the old entrance to the Tate Britain; that on the left was presented by the sculptor's widow, marking his death in 1911 - and just as well, for without the benefaction, her husband would be represented in no national collection. He, Charles Bennett Lawes-Wittewronge, born in 1843, baronet, educated at Eton and Trinity, performer of great feats of oarsmanship and running, turned to sculpture after Cambridge and worked in the then current blend of naturalism and classical subject that was international in his day. His Death of Dirce is a characteristic example. Dirce was a cruel Queen of ancient Thebes whom two bastard sons of Zeus tied to the horns of a bull to drag her to her death; the enraged bull rears, the naked victim slips from his back before the puny twins can tie the necessary knot and all is confusion and entwinement. The conception is natural enough, but the idea is stale, its origin too obviously the even bigger Roman sculpture known as The Farnese Bull in Naples.

Lawes-Wittewronge was not prolific, exhibiting only 12 sculptures in 40 years. He remained as interested in athletics as in art, and at the age of 55 took up speed cycling; within a year he had achieved the record of 25 miles in 51 minutes.